Bell-ends, Pillocks, Numpties, and Sh*tgibbons: Why the Brits Swear Better

My book Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English—an outgrowth of the Not One-Off Britishisms blog—looks at several hundred words and phrases that have made their way across the pond—including brunch (surprisingly), kerfuffle, easy peasy, and go missing. But I had the most fun looking into the swear words and insults, at which the Brits are brilliant. Here are a few examples.

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“Bell-end”

The American author Catherynne Valente wrote on Facebook: “Y’all can’t stop being hateful and I’m tired of getting notifications that someone else is being [an] absolute bell-end about their fellow man on NextDoor.” (Apparently, in Valente’s town, people had been making virulent anti-immigrant comments on the NextDoor community forum.)

Bell-end (it’s variously printed as hyphenated, two words, and one word) is categorized by the OED as “British coarse slang.” Two definitions are offered, the first being “the glans of the penis”; the earliest citation is the 1961 edition of Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, where it’s listed along with the comparable terms blunt end and red end. The second definition is “a foolish or contemptible man or boy.” It shows up in 1992, and the most recent citation is from 2008 in The Guardian: “Clearly, no one’s ever taken them aside and said, ‘Er, you sound like a bit of a bell-end here. Perhaps you ought to sit down and be quiet.’” (Bell End is also a village in the English county of Worcestershire.)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang notes a derivative noun form, seen in this 2017 quote, also from The Guardian: “Arrogant bellendery seems to be common feature amongst the Alumni of Fettes College.”

When I posted about bell-end on Not One-Off Britishims, frequent commenter Nick L. Tipper weighed in,

In U.K. football grounds a stand of seating will tend to be named after a local dignitary, sponsor, hero from the club’s history, or geographical feature. Such stands, if behind the goal, may be called “ends.” Thus Aston Villa FC has the Holte End; Liverpool the Kop End, etc.

In 2003, according to a Guardian report, Manchester City Football Club sought their fans’ opinion of what a new stand should be called. A large majority wanted it to be called after former star-player Colin Bell but there was talk of the poll having been nobbled by fans of other teams wanting Manchester City to be humiliated by having a stand referred to—at least colloquially—as “The Bell End” (even though it is to the side of the pitch).

There is now a Colin Bell Stand at the Man City ground.

None of the citations in Green’s or the OED are from the U.S., and indeed, I have not been able to find it used by anyone here other than Valente. And speaking of Valente, her website bio notes, “She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics.”

I gather that along with the BA she picked up some salty language.

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“Pillock”; “wazzock”; “numpty”; “shitgibbon”

An ad that aired during the 2016 Super Bowl showed Dame Helen Mirren sitting before a hamburger, being served a Budweiser (not bloody likely), and counseling, in strong language, against driving drunk. Anyone who does so, she averred, is a “shortsighted, utterly useless, oxygen-wasting human form of pollution.” She concludes, “Don’t be a pillock.” (By the way, Dame Helen said “drunk driving” but the British phrase—not seen or heard in the U.S. as yet—is “drink-driving.”)

My guess is that somewhere north of 99 percent of the people who saw the spot in America had no idea what a pillock is—though they could clearly tell by context clues that it wasn’t a good thing. I certainly wasn’t familiar with the term and went straight to the OED, whose first definition is, “Orig. Sc[ottish]. The penis. Now Eng. Regional (north.) and rare.” The copywriter for the Mirren commercial was clearly going for definition no. 2, which is, “Chiefly Brit. Colloq. (mildly derogatory). A stupid person; a fool, an idiot.” The first OED citation for the figurative use is from 1967, the most recent from a rugby magazine in 2004: “Those mindless pillocks in New Zealand who slated England for the way they played in Wellington in June.”

Another meaning, unmentioned by the OED, is suggested in Angus McClaren’s 2007 book Impotence: A Cultural History. In the early modern period, he writes, an impotent man was scorned as a “malkin, pillock, fumbler, fribble, bungler, bobtail, domine-do-little, weak-doing man, Goodman Do-Little, and John Cannot.”

Pillock may have rung a faint bell in the minds of English majors. It is likely a shortening of another word for “penis” that turns up in King Lear. Edgar, in his guise as the mad beggar Poor Tom, pipes up at one point with a line from a perverse ditty: “Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill. La, la, la, la!” (Use your imagination for the meaning of “Pillicock hill.”)

The Mirren advert seems to have sparked a small uptick in U.S. uses of the word. It appeared in a 2020 New York Times blog and, memorably, in a 2022 article by Devorah Blachor noting one advantage of the new Mastodon social network over Twitter (as it was then called) under Elon Musk: “All the servers are interlinked, and there’s not even one ego-bloated pillock amplifying Nazis or getting publicly owned by Doja Cat.” And speaking of Twitter, now X, the word is used now and again by Americans there, including this in 2021 (not sure who the New York-based tweeter is talking about): “I’ll take your word for it as I live in the USA & have no idea who he is except you seem to be implying he’s a pillock.”

Clearly, the British have a knack for insults. Another pungent one is wazzock, which came on the American radar in 2012, when the Daily Telegraph hurled it at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. New Yorker contributor John Cassidy fondly described the epithet as “a term of abuse that I hadn’t heard since my childhood in Leeds, West Yorkshire.” History kind of repeated itself four years later, after a petition advocating banning the next Republican nominee, Donald Trump, from setting foot in the United Kingdom attracted some six hundred thousand signatures. The House of Commons actually considered the question. They ended up not taking a vote, but in the course of debate, MP Victoria Atkins said Trump was a wazzock.

Surprisingly, this word seems never to have meant “penis”; the OED labels it “unknown origin” and defines it as “a stupid or annoying person.” As Cassidy suggests, it comes from the north of England and probably sprang up around the time of his childhood, in the 1970s. It seems to be used a bit less in the U.S. than pillock, one exception being Marty Kelley, writing in Wonkette in 2021. He addressed Tucker Carlson as “you pampered millionaire Fox News wazzock.”

It would appear that Trump has inspired an insult renaissance in the U.K., as well as spillover in the United States. Another term that has been applied to him is numpty. The OED describes it as originating in Scotland and gives this possible etymology: “Origin uncertain; perhaps an alteration of numps n. or numbskull n., with ending perhaps remodelled after humpty-dumpty n.” The first citation is from 1985 (“ ‘They are a pair of turkeys,’ he said. ‘Numpties, the both of them.’ ”—P. Firth, The Great Pervader), and more recent ones show a migration to England. One NOOBs reader reported that it was the only nonprofane insult regularly used by Jamie McDonald in Armando Iannucci’s satiric comedy The Thick of It, and another reader said, “My favourite description for the relatively new Scottish Parliament is ‘the Numptorium.’ ”

Neither the OED nor Green’s Dictionary of Slang shows U.S. use, but the term did appear in the New York Times in 2009, when Dallas-born novelist Bill Cotter said,

In the mid-’80s, Boston’s Kenmore Square, where part of [his novel Fever Chart] is set, was home to three-card-monte men, ordinary punks, beer-devastated Red Sox bleacher-seat numpties, the Guardian Angel menace, and the only music venue worth visiting in that fourth-rate city, the Rat, a black basement often populated with bloody-nosed hardcore girls swinging tiny fists of stone.

More recently, it has been seen on Twitter and X, inevitably regarding the most frequent subject of all these insults, the former U.S. president. Here are some tweets posted in the course of a day, all within two hundred kilometers of New York City and tagging Trump:

“Numpty you are a joke.”

“You’re a real numpty.”

“Numpty you realize how you are becoming more of a laughing stock than you were prior to G7.”

And now we come to shitgibbon. (When I started my writing career, I could not have predicted that one day I would compose that sentence.) Unsurprisingly, it’s not in the OED, but Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines it as “a general insult, usu. characterizing Donald Trump.” Some sleuthing by the indefatigable Ben Zimmer found what appears to be not only the first use but the invention of the word, in a line written by British music journalist David Quantick. He told Zimmer that “spunk-faced shitgibbon” was “a phrase I used in a 1988 column in New Musical Express and have put in most of my writing since.” Quantick can also claim responsibility for introducing the term to the United States, as he wrote an episode of HBO’s Veep in 2012 where the character Senator Andrew Doyle calls a rival a “gold-plated fucking shitgibbon.”

The Trump connection came in 2016, when he falsely claimed that Scotland had voted for Brexit, and someone posted on Twitter, “Scotland voted to stay & plan on a second referendum, you tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon.”

Among the Americans to pick it up was a Democratic state legislator from my home region, the suburbs of Philadelphia, who tweeted, “Hey @realDonaldTrump I oppose civil asset forfeiture too! Why don’t you try to destroy my career you fascist, loofa-faced, shitgibbon!”

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From Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English by Ben Yagoda. Copyright © 2024. Available from Princeton University Press.